Restaurants & Bars

I finally managed to get over to Poggio last week, where I'd been hearing good things about the cocktails, wine list, after-dinner drinks, and, yes, even the food. I wasn't disappointed. No driving is necessary--take a shuttle boat from the Ferry Building and it's only a few paces over to Poggio's front door.

I spent a couple of days over the weekend perusing the Anderson Valley and the Mendocino coast. Naturally enjoying all that pristine beauty on a sunny day with a cleansing breeze and pounding surf, one gets thirsty. So I searched up and down the coastline up there for the perfect spot to have a beer.

Enough about Texas--it feels good to be back in the place I really love.

Now, perhaps my future as a drinks writer was predictable given my childhood love of root beer. I loved it so much as a 10-year-old that I was consistently able to taste the root beer blind at restaurants and accurately guess the producer--Fanta, A&W, Mug, whatever it may be. That deep love lives on, so it's hard to convey how pleasantly surprised I was to find homemade root beer at the Magnolia Brewery and Pub. Creamy and delicious, one of its best attributes is that it's not too sweet.

No doubt, there is some very good barbecue in San Francisco. I'm a fan of Memphis Minnie's on Haight Street, as well as Lily's (formerly Brother-in-Law's) on Divisidero. But, in my opinion, you can't get better barbecue than in Texas, specifically in the Austin area. Texas Monthly magazine has consistently rated three bbq joints in central Texas among the top four in the state. So with my, yes, brother-in-law, sister and niece (all visiting from Seattle), mom and wife, we made the hour-long pilgrimage from Austin to Llano to eat at the venerated Cooper's BBQ.

I went back to Austin, Texas last week for Passover. It's the town I grew up in, and thus naturally where I learned to drink. I'm going to follow with a couple of posts about my visit--my first in two years--and reflections on the drinking I did then versus what I do now.

Technically, I’m supposed to blog about alcoholic beverages, but today I’m going to talk about something that almost everyone who indulges in stiff drinks also needs: coffee. Specifically, I’m going to write about one very special little coffee shop of San Francisco, The Coffee Roaster in the Financial District.

I flew up to Seattle last week to attend a special tasting of what most people consider to be Washington State’s finest wine and others even call it the best Bordeaux variety wine made in the country, Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon.